How The Pentagon Went From ‘Dudes In Dresses’ To ‘Actual War Fighting’

War Department Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson says a lot has changed in the United States military over the last year — and that at the end of the day, it all comes down to a shift in the culture.

Wilson sat down with The Daily Wire’s Mary Margaret Olohan to discuss some of the changes made at the Pentagon and within the ranks since President Donald Trump began his second term and put decorated Army veteran Pete Hegseth in charge of his War Department.

“The biggest changes have really been the culture,” she said, adding, “We’ve gotten away from the ideology in the military, the politics. No more climate change, no more dudes in dresses, as the Secretary likes to say. We’re getting back to actual war fighting and the Warrior Ethos — standards, fitness, eating right, merit-based programs.”

Wilson said that the cultural shift also included a move toward promoting those who earned it through merit rather than those who simply checked the right boxes in pursuit of an ideological agenda.

“That has refocused the Department on our core mission,” she said. “And what that’s allowed us to do is be more lethal.”

WATCH:

Wilson touted several major operations, from the surgical strikes on narcoterrorists in the Caribbean to the more recent arrest and extraction of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, and said that effective leadership and a shift toward lethality were behind those successes and many others.

A shift in priorities, Wilson said, was also underway, from “nation-building” and toward “war-fighting.”

“We’re making sure that our missions aren’t just drawn out with no clear end state,” she continued. “We’re going in with what success looks like, we’re making sure we attain that, and then we’re getting out and protecting the homeland and always putting America first.”

Wilson also addressed the extreme number of attacks directed at War Secretary Pete Hegseth — attacks that began as soon as he was nominated to head the Pentagon.

“That’s because, in many ways, he’s over the target,” she explained. “And he’s somebody who’s going to be a true change agent at the Department of War, and he, from day one, has gotten to work implementing all of those changes. And I think he gets so much hate, especially from the mainstream media and from the leftwing politicians in D.C. because he is that change agent. He’s not your typical Secretary of Defense who has maybe contracted for the big defense companies … he’s a true soldier’s soldier.”

Wilson rounded out the interview with a few details about the recent mission to capture Maduro and the plan to revamp the long-standing military publication Stars and Stripes, along with a promise that the War Department would always continue to put the warfighters first.